In a small study, Danilo Mandic from Imperial College London has shown that his hearable can be used to capture heart data. The device detected heart pulse by sensing the dilation and constriction of tiny blood vessels in the ear canal, using the mechanical part of the electro-mechanical sensor. The hearable is made of foam and […]

Tao Sun, Nathan McDannold, Eric Miller and Brigham & Women’s and Tufts colleagues have developed a controller that offers a finer degree of control in penetrating the blood brain barrier for drug delivery. The technology, only tested in rats, could improve safety in humans if found effective. Using focused ultrasound and microbubbles as before, the team […]

Andrew Ng and Stanford colleagues used AI to detect pneumonia from x-rays with similar accuracy to trained radiologists. The CheXNet model analyzed 112,200 frontal-view X-ray images of 30,805 unique patients released by the NIH (ChestX-ray14.) Deep Learning algorithms also detected14 diseases including fibrosis, hernias, and cell masses, with fewer false positives and negatives than NIH […]

In a small study, USC’s Dong Song demonstrated the efficacy of an implantable “memory prosthesis.” Dr. Song presented his work at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington this week. 20 volunteers had the device implanted at the same time as electrodes for epilepsy treatment, a procedure which they had already planned. The “prosthesis” collected brain […]

MIT’s Ed Boyden and Paris Descartes University’s Valentina Emiliani have developed a new optogenetic technique, combined with new opsins, that stimulates individual cells with precise control over both the timing and location of the activation. This will allow the study of how individual cells, and connections among those cells, generate specific behaviors such as initiating a movement or […]